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PowerPoint memory leak - Application becomes slower while editing

Gunderz 175 Reputation points
Feb 6, 2023, 3:50 PM

For the last 6 months I have been experiencing PowerPoint getting slower and slower while editing (complex) presentations. I work in the live events industry and this happens on all PC's. - All of my self employed colleagues that create advanced PowerPoint presentations are experiencing EXACTLY the same. - We all have very high end machines with Nvidia RTX3080 graphics cards if not quicker, i9 processors, 32gb+ of RAM, SSD drives etc.

PowerPoint on startup is as quick as you would expect it to be on these powerful machines. Then after a period of editing (nothing paticular) - from inserting videos, editing SVGS, editing in the animation pane, PowerPoint becomes more and more unresponsive and slow until you get to the point of it crashing - the application fades, the circle of death cursor appears and it has to restart (recovering your work if you're lucky)

The only way to rectify this problem if you want to be productive is to continuously restart PowerPoint and then it's back to a fast performance before it happens again.

This what I suspect to be a memory leak also happens to us all when in show mode. - If there is a looping video in the background of multiple slides for example (however big it is - i.e a 5mb looping WMV or MP4) it eventually stops playing when in slide show which is the first sign of PowerPoint crashing imminently. This being during a live show, We have to swap machines to the backup PC onto the same slide with nobody noticing and then exit the slideshow and start it again to get the videos to play again. If you don't do this and don't take the videos stopping as a warning, PowerPoint eventually becomes irresponsive in the middle of a live show.

Please sort this out Microsoft. These machines are capable of playing the latest advanced computer games and rendering videos in After Effects etc. Yet PowerPoint is apparently using up all system resources (and apparently not releasing them until you restart it) - and crippling our machines with even simple slides that have under 10mb of content on them.

PowerPoint
PowerPoint
A family of Microsoft presentation graphics products that offer tools for creating presentations and adding graphic effects like multimedia objects and special effects with text.
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  1. Info 0 Reputation points
    Sep 1, 2024, 6:52 PM

    I have the same problem. Except I experience it only in presentation mode. I use a lot of animations and transitions. PowerPoint does great upon the start of the presentation. But after about 3 slides it slows down and the animations become jerky. Very disappointing! I have not experienced a crash.

    Microsoft, please fix this. PowerPoint is a very commonly used tool.

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  2. Simon Baldwin 1 Reputation point
    Oct 15, 2024, 9:11 PM

    We are experiencing this issue on a Mac running Mac OS Sonoma with 32GB of RAM. It is getting to the point where the Mac is exhausting all the 32GB of RAM and then the Swap! On Activity monitor, I saw Powerpoint using 96GB of RAM. This is just editing large powerpoints with lots of music and video added. Surely this can be fixed? Asking us to contact support etc. is just insulting, there is an issue with the software that needs to be fixed. Thank you for the Keynote suggestion, will try that...

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  3. r2xman 0 Reputation points
    Nov 10, 2024, 1:03 AM

    With the latest updates (Sequoia, OS 15.1, and Powerpoint 16.90.2 (24102719), this memory leak problem with Powerpoint appears to be fixed.

    (I did a wipe of my hard drive, and a brand new install, for some other problems, recently, maybe that had something to do with it).

    16 inch MacBook Pro, M2 Max, 32 GB RAM.

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